The Law of Insulation
IN ONE LINE
The more power you have to change an organisation, the less of its friction you experience yourself.
Three minutes.
The law
Seniority changes your experience of an organisation.
As you gain authority, some problems become easier to solve. Decisions happen faster. Information is prepared for you. Other people coordinate around your diary, anticipate what you need and resolve problems before they reach you.
That’s useful. Senior people couldn’t operate effectively otherwise.
But it creates a strange consequence.
The people with the greatest power to change how an organisation works can have the least direct experience of what working in it actually feels like.
Authority doesn’t just give you power. It changes what reaches you.
That is the Law of Insulation.
Why it happens
Imagine something as ordinary as getting a decision.
For someone close to the top, it might take a five-minute conversation.
Elsewhere, that same decision could require a meeting, a paper, three approvals, two weeks of waiting and several rounds of clarification.
Both people work in the same organisation.
They don’t experience the same organisation.
The difference becomes more important as seniority increases because people naturally start managing what reaches you.
Problems arrive with proposed solutions. Information gets condensed. Complexity gets simplified. Disagreements are worked through before the meeting. People try not to waste your time.
Again, none of this is necessarily dysfunctional.
Much of it is good organisational behaviour.
But the cumulative effect is insulation.
The paradox
The people closest to the work experience the friction directly.
They know which process takes three times longer than it should. Which decision always gets stuck. Which workaround everybody quietly uses. Which priority doesn’t fit with the other six. Which supposedly simple request creates days of work.
But they may have little authority to change the conditions creating those problems.
At the top, the relationship reverses.
You have far more power to change priorities, investment, structures, decision rights and expectations.
But much less reason to encounter the friction personally.
The people who feel it most can change it least.
The people who can change it most may feel it least.
That’s not a criticism of either group.
It’s a consequence of where they sit.
Why this matters
Insulation becomes dangerous when personal experience is mistaken for organisational experience.
A process can look simple from the point at which you enter it.
A decision can look quick because other people have already spent two weeks preparing it.
A reporting requirement can look lightweight because you see the finished page rather than the work required to produce it.
A strategic change can look straightforward because you make the decision once, while hundreds of people have to reconcile it with everything already underway.
Nobody has to be hiding anything for this gap to exist.
You simply see a different part of the machinery.
And the higher the decision, the larger the consequences of misunderstanding what that machinery is actually doing.
Use the law
When something appears surprisingly difficult, slow or resistant, don’t begin with:
Why can’t they just do this?
Ask:
What does this require from where they sit?
Follow the decision, request or process through the organisation rather than looking only at the part that reaches you.
How many people touch it?
What has to happen before it gets to you?
What happens after you send it back?
What competing demands are the people involved already carrying?
You aren’t trying to experience everybody’s job.
You’re looking for the friction your position naturally removes from view.
The higher you go, the more deliberately you have to look for what your position allows you not to see.
Last updated October 2026
